What the Murders of the Fogel Family Say About Palestinian and Muslim Jew Hatred

Dennis Prager, at Townhall.com, writes that the terrorist murders of the Fogel family, including a 3-month old infant, at Itamar and the gang rape of CBS News correspondent Lara Logan (whose attackers shouted, "Jew, Jew") tell us a good deal about Palestinian and Muslim Jew hatred:

The two incidents tell the same tale. In much of the Arab Muslim and some of the non-Arab Muslim world today (such as Iran), "Jew" is not a person. "Jew" is not even merely the enemy. In fact, there is no parallel on Earth to what "Jew" means to a hundred million, perhaps hundreds of millions of Muslims.

Think of any conflict in the world -- Pakistan-India, China-Tibet, North Korea-South Korea, Tamil-Sinhalese. There are some deep hatreds there, and atrocities have been committed on one or both sides of those conflicts. But in none of those conflicts nor anywhere else is there something equivalent to what "Jew" means to millions of Muslims.

There really is only one historical parallel, and it, too, involved the word "Jew." The Nazis also succeeded in fully dehumanizing the word "Jew." Thus, for Nazism, it was as important (if not more so) to murder Jewish babies and children -- often through as cruel a means as possible (being burned alive, buried alive or thrown up in the air and impaled on bayonets) -- as it was to murder Jewish adults.

Bret Stephens expresses a similar view in a Wall Street Journal column, entitled "Are Settlers Even Human?" An excerpt of that column appears here at World Jewish Daily.com. Unfortunately the full column in the Wall Street Journal is available only to subscribers.

I would like to think that Messrs. Prager and Stephens are wrong or are exaggerating the situation. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that they are right. It is no repudiation of Dennis' argument to say that many, perhaps most Moslems do not dehumanize Jews. Most Germans did not dehumanize Jews.

(HT: National Council of Young Israel.)